Ahmadinejad’s Murder Machine: A
Look at Tehran's Casualty

Fox News, July 30, 2007

Alireza Jafarzadeh

As the U.S. wound up its second
meeting with Iran to discuss the security of Iraq, the
Iranian regime continued to face its own escalating
insecurity. The deterioration of Iran’s economy, increase in
civil unrest and sharp deterioration of
human rights under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are
three examples of a nation unraveling at the seams.

Ahmadinejad has taken desperate
measures to reign in the escalating civil unrest throughout
Iranian society by closing newspapers, enforcing strict
dress codes and stepping up public hangings and stonings.
The high priority of implementing these new “security
measures” was made clear in a July 2007 interview with the
director of Iran’s prison system, Ali Akbar Yessaqi, who
spoke with Iran’s state-controlled news agency (ISNA). In
his interview, Yessaqi conceded the existence of the
regime’s secret prisons [torture centers] for political
prisoners, the execution of juveniles and the policy of
making arbitrary arrests, and also reported that Tehran is
building 41 new prisons in Iran.

The Iranian regime’s rise in
executions in recent weeks included a group execution in
Tehran’s Evin Prison on July 22, where 12 prisoners were
hung simultaneously. Two out of the 12 condemned men were
political prisoners who were transferred from another prison
to be executed with the others — an all-too-common method of
silencing dissidents in Iran. On many occasions, political
prisoners have been tagged with trumped-up convictions of
drug trafficking and other crimes in order to receive the
death penalty.

Amnesty International has
recorded at least 124 executions since the beginning of
2007. Two recent victims of the Iranian authorities' use of
the death penalty were those whose alleged crimes were
committed before the age of 18. In addition, the human
rights organization reported that in one case, an
18-year-old girl, Nazanin, was sentenced to be executed for
having, at age 17, stabbed to death one of three men in a
park who were attempting to rape her and her younger niece.

The pace of executions in Iran
is stunning. In July alone, several public hangings were
carried throughout the country: in the northern province of
Mazandaran, the southeastern province of
Sistan-va-Baluchistan, the central cities of Arak and
Isfahan, the southern province of Fars, and in the
northwestern province of East Azerbaijan, where three men
were hanged as a group. Another group hanging took place in
an undisclosed city, as witnessed in a shocking video
smuggled out of Iran by members of Iran's main opposition,
the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), this month that shows a young
woman and two men being hanged in a public square.

Hanging is not the only form of
capital punishment routinely enforced in Iran: in the first
week of July, a man convicted of adultery was stoned to
death in Qazvin province, while senior Iranian officials
defended this medieval act.

One senior Iranian cleric, Ahmad
Jannati, the leader of the regime’s Council of Guardians,
defended the increased executions in religious terms: “If it
was Imam Ali (the first Shi’ite leader after Prophet
Mohammad), he would have executed more people because he was
not a man who would have compromised with those who disrupt
[the] security of the society.” President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad defended the executions as a way for Iran to
protect society “with all its power.”

Sixteen people were arrested on
July 9, the eighth anniversary of the student demonstrations
in 1999 that were violently suppressed by security forces.
One of the student activists of the 1999 demonstrations who
had once served six months in prison in Tehran, and was
recently rearrested by the Iranian regime as a "street
hooligan," was sentenced to death for breaching the
"security" of the country.

Security crackdowns in July also
included an upsurge in arrests of women and men who do not
strictly follow the regime’s dress code. Tehran’s police
spokesman, Mehdi Ahmadi, stated on July 23 that the
department had hired additional officers for this push,
including 100 women. The new campaign, he said, would target
women who “dressed like models,” in other words, those that
were badly veiled or wore form-fitting overcoats or trousers
that showed their ankles. The expanded security force also
goes after men who wear “Western-style haircuts and
clothing”— and the hairdressers and shop owners who outfit
them.

Ahmadi emphasized that the plan
was not just restricted to enforcing Islamic dress rules,
but also targeted all those who disrupt "security" in
society, exposing the desperation of a regime facing
widespread dissent from an extremely young population, 67
percent of which is under the age of 25.

Earlier in the year, in a
hideous act, Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East
Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, was detained with
other Iranian-Americans by the regime on baseless charges.

Despite increased crackdowns on
dissent during Ahmadinejad’s presidency, protests continue
to spring up among Iran’s workers, teachers and bus drivers
who repeatedly form demonstrations over their low and unpaid
wages. In March, officials arrested 1,000 teachers among the
10,000 protesting their salaries outside the parliament in
Tehran; the income of high school teachers in Iran — even
though higher than that of many government workers — puts
them below the poverty line. Bus drivers have gone on strike
to protest the government’s refusal to recognize their union
rights, and thousands of them have been arrested. The regime
also arrested the wives and children of union activists in
order to compel the activists to come forward. Workers’
riots and demonstrations reveal how profoundly Ahmadinejad
has failed to deliver on his promises to be the champion of
the Iranian worker and put the country’s oil wealth “on
people’s tables.”

University students, enraged at
these actions and other "fascist" policies of Ahmadinejad's
“dictatorship,” continuously form campus protests that are
met with bloody crackdowns by the authorities. Students
carrying banners demanding “freedom of expression” are
routinely beaten with chains, stabbed and arrested with no
further word to their families.

People are increasingly
frustrated with the economy’s poor growth, rising inflation
and lack of distribution of oil wealth. In addition to
rationing gasoline in late June, the world’s second
largest crude oil producer has seen both inflation and
unemployment soar to 30 percent, housing prices double in
one year and food prices skyrocket since U.N. sanctions were
imposed last December.

Looking to Iran for help in
ending the chaos in Iraq, as the U.S. tried to do in a
second round of talks in July, is an untenable approach.
Not only is
Tehran the main source of violence and insecurity in Iraq
as it strives toward its own expansionist goals, but it is
also mired in domestic crises that expose the failings of a
grossly troubled and highly unpopular regime seeking to
guarantee its own survival at the expense of Iraq's demise.
The United States is better off exploiting Iran's internal
vulnerability and reaching out to — not the Ayatollahs — but
the people of Iran, who are already determined to replace
the regime with a democratic, secular and pluralistic
system. This is the only way that Iraq would see peace,
security and stability as well.

Jafarzadeh has revealed
Iran's terrorist network in Iraq and its terror training
camps since 2003. He first disclosed the existence of the
Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the Arak heavy water
facility in August 2002.

Prior to becoming a
contributor for FOX, and until August 2003, Jafarzadeh acted
for a dozen years as the chief congressional liaison and
media spokesman for the U.S. representative office of Iran's
parliament in exile, the National Council of Resistance of
Iran.

The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis by
Alireza Jafarzadeh